Oh my. I have so many thoughts on this book. I must have requested it a while back because it popped up on publication day in the Libby app to download. The book starts off with the author as a high school student meeting her now husband at a record store.
She was pretty straight laced with little dating experience beyond what seems to have been a not very physical relationship with a boy who shared a lot of interests and a haircut! The man she met was almost 25, a high school drop out and working part time in the record store.
They start dating. She seems to believe this and I think as a 17 year old, it would be pretty common to but pretty much anyone over the age of 22 can testify how much high schoolers look like babies. Where did he think she was between pm each day?
I have no idea what her parents were thinking though. She must be almost exactly my age and I know my parents would not have wanted me dating a grown man! She basically lives with him from her freshman year on. He starts getting mysterious illnesses that take up a lot of time. He tells her of a troubled childhood with divorced parents, big moves and a childhood friend dying.
The book goes back and forth between their early years together in the early s and a more current timeline where he is very mysteriously ill. If he is the manipulative predator I think the book describes, then he has been abusing his wife and their whole family for years. Or less likely, they are both enmeshed in some sort of mental illness together or are con artists and want to profit of it? Again, at many points she does seem to have doubts or guess that readers may too but she always explains them away.
